The Family Friend, C. MacDonald [ereader for android TXT] 📗

blame, they should be seen entirely as they are. A man trying to suppress the ambition, voice and power of a woman who threatens his ego. A man wanting his woman to be some Victorian mother and wife, madonna, whore and nothing else. To those who accuse Erin, to those who think her silence on the matter is some suggestion of guilt, be you whatever gender, I implore you to take a long hard look at the facts and YOURSELF and think about re-evaluating the way you look at the world and other people.

#brauneoverbrave

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Imogen trowels a large mound of soil into a rusted frying pan and takes it over to a pile of sticks that Caz and Erin have assembled to be their stand-in fire at the far end of the garden of Erin’s rented house. It’s only three bedrooms but its owner is an amazing interior designer Erin knew from her Instagram days who’s now moved to Porto, so it looks incredible. She and Bobby have been living here the past four months, since she moved back to the sea from being with her mum. As she looks at Caz helping Bobby make a mud-castle with a bright pink plastic bucket, she realises she’s one of the big reasons why she came back. Caz, the sea and the fact that in and around Croydon there seemed to be about four times the amount of people who used to follow her and knew, thanks to the fact that the tabloids ran wild with the story, everything that happened six months ago.

‘Not even tempted then?’ Caz says down from where she is.

‘Nope,’ Erin says with a definitive shake of the head.

‘Most people probably have some awful reason they got their big break. You deserve something good to come out of it. Now, tap the top, Bobby-boy, that’s right, tap, tap, tap.’

Erin squirts some water from her bottle onto the pile of dry soil Imogen’s got her hands in and she giggles with the mess. Erin’s just been telling Caz about the swathe of offers to audition her old acting agent’s had since the news broke. Nothing brilliant, a couple of fringe plays, a Shakespeare in Leeds, Hollyoaks, an American network sitcom. It seems so bizarre that people are suddenly interested in her from that point of view but she knows the producers are all thinking of the PR angle. Everyone wants to be seen as the person that gave a traumatised former actor her restart and they’ll be thinking how journalists will lap up the chance to rake over the sordid details of her and her late fiancé’s relationship. Grace’s been in touch as well. A production company are pitching a true-crime documentary about the whole thing, but Erin shut it down, cited the fact that she wanted to move on. She does. They all deserve to move on.

‘That ship’s sailed I think, Cazabelle, and it’s for the best.’ Bobby toddles over to his mother, covered head to toe in mud, and hugs at her trouser leg. She bends down and he leaps into her arms getting dirt all over her #gifted couture dungarees and she couldn’t care less. ‘I’m happy where I am,’ she says and she means it. Now Bobby’s a bit older, his tummy’s not causing him any problems and the screaming has stopped. The couple of months she spent with just Bobby and her mum, trapped in the house while the story about Raf blew over, had been some of her happiest since she was a kid. For Erin and her mum, the feeling of them against a cruel world, the permission to mother and be mothered, erased the guilt and blame they’d felt towards each other, rebuilding their relationship organically; but, more than that, coming back to each other as adults, they’ve discovered a friendship that had never been there before. Her mum’s currently looking at houses, planning on moving down to be near her daughter and grandson. And with Bobby, that time cemented the kind of bond, the kind of intense love and dependency on each other that, for the first few months of his life, Erin didn’t think they’d ever have.

As she looks around her huge garden – she won’t be here much longer, she needs to buy somewhere smaller as her new job, she’s training to be a drama teacher, isn’t going to pay for a particularly lavish life – she notices how much lighter she feels now. She’d never realised it before, so grateful was she to Raf for working to support her and put a roof over her head, that trying to please him, trying to second-guess what she had to do to avoid one of his suggestions of how she could do things better, had created this intense anxiety, a weight in her that she’d not felt before they were together.

But perhaps the sense of freedom comes from somewhere else. Raf left over seven million Australian dollars. When Erin got the call from an Australian solicitor she almost slammed the phone down in disbelief. She should have put it together from Amanda’s journal and the mention of some huge estate him and his dad were living on, but it seems that Raf wasn’t just more comfortable than he was letting on to her, he was in fact from an incredibly wealthy family, a line of Italian factory owners who’d moved to Australia a few years before the Second World War. It also explained why, after getting engaged less than a year after they met, Raf had never pushed marriage in the same way he’d pushed everything else – to try and ensure she had no legal recourse over his fortune. The lawyer told her that all of the money is bequeathed to Bobby and there’s no doubt that, even if Erin never earns more than enough to feed them and clothe them, the knowledge that